Wednesday, October 5, 2011

As political ideas often begin east and travel west, the great Occupy Wall Street peaceful protests taking place around the country has hit our city and Occupy Long Beach has landed, reaching City Hall today.

In case you haven’t watched any news besides mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street began September 17, 2011 on Wall Street, inspired by massive public and peaceful protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madri’d Puerta del Sol Square. Since that date, protestors have been chanting, camping out, marching and getting arrested in NYC. On Saturday as hundreds marched the Brooklyn Bridge in unison, more than 700 were reportedly arrested and some minor violence from NYPD has been recorded.

Nationally spawned in New York by a group called Adbusters, a formula has been created to put an end to corporate control and corporate greed running our Washington representatives and damaging our country. It begins with a big swarm of people talking to each other at various physical gatherings and virtual mediums, focusing in one a centralized demand and then going out to “seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen,” the Adbusters website said.

So far, the demand has been labeled on the Adbusters website as “we demand that President Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It’s time for DEMOCRACY ot CORPORATOCRACY, we’re doomed without it.”

In Long Beach, a website is in the works, but meetings have been and will continue to take place this week at Bluff Park at 6 pm (Junipero and Ocean, on the bluff leading to the beach) and will be scheduled as the days proceed.

Currently, Occupy Long Beach has been growing as the days go by, with more and more ideas and questions arising at these meetings. To my understanding, today participants planned to address City Hall with efforts to receive an order to peacefully protest in our city and get the council members to understand that they too are part of the 99% of the people dictated by the greedy and corrupted 1% population.

A great source to learn more about the protests taking place around the country, tune into Democracy Now, the group that started it all Adbusters, the unofficial hub for the movement Occupy Together, and check out some YouTube videos that show its extent.

Locally, you can “Like” the FaceBook page created at Occupy Long Beach and attend the scheduled meetings Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at Bluff Park at 6 PM. After all, “Our nation, our species and our world are in a crisis. The U.S. has an imprtant role to play in the solution, but we can no longer afford to let corporate greed and corrupt politics set the policies of our nation,” OccupyWallStreet.org states.

Will you participate? Will you become involved? Please share your thoughts and understanding of these national and local protests.